The Reentry
Comes with a poem!
Right now for me is all about rebalancing. I’m very fortunate that I’m only working four days not five, and actually really like working behind a bar again (for the first time since the nineties,) but I’ve already taken on new responsibilities, and the demons of past General Manager jobs have been offering unsolicited opinions on my level of competence and the possible likelihood of my failure at performing the tasks associated with the nightly closing.
Of course, most of it could be completed by a well-trained monkey, but I broke two of my personal goals related to reeentry into the workforce when I accepted full-time work at my new job, 1) to not have a long commute, and 2) to not to work for a friend again. So if something goes forgotten, I’m a 45 minute train ride away, and since I chose to work not just for a friend, but also an important mentor of mine, I feel like it would be a personal betrayal if I forgot to lock a door or worse, left the breadwarmers on. I loathe the breadwarmers. Sure, warm bread is good, but I take so many pictures of them in the “off position” before I leave, it’s like an appliance photo shoot.
Plus, I am actually enjoying what I’m doing now, which naturally leads me to assume it won’t work out, and that something will go super sideways, and then I’ll be forced into the hideous morass of waiting tables again, and I absolutely don’t have the bandwidth for that anymore, as in: “I survived Covid for this?”
From J.:
“Then the food comes, except that he (me) messed up my and someone else’s order, so we have to send back our plates and wait for the correct dish. When I called him over to tell him they’d brought us the wrong thing, he gave me a very condescending look, which everyone noticed.”
No.
So that’s the story four days a week, and negotiating the other three is it’s own story. A spiritual thinker I like very much, Kiam Marcelo Junio, ((https://linktr.ee/iamkiam,) talks about how important “anchors” are to remaining more centered in the moment, and the question becomes, which anchors that were helping during the long quarantine are still useful and which ones felt necessary as a particular response to the contours of confinement but no longer serve?
So, now I don’t write my daily mileage by foot on the calendar, but I still track it on the phone. I still do a cooking show with my Dad, but we’ve moved it to my third day off, because Mondays, at least so far, I am comatose and brain dead from the previous four days of work. And after a flurry of July birthday cards and thank-you cards, which almost depleted the fifty pieces of card stock I bought to process photo notecards for https://tinamarkphotocards.etsy.com/, and with another month passing with no orders, I am forced to conclude, as Elektra’s fellow Dominatrix tells her on the “Life’s A Beach” episode of “Pose,” that “this business is seasonal…”
My weekly walk with JR is still essential, but I need to cut down on the cooking. There’s not two grand landing in the bank every two weeks, I am not trying to leave a trail of dishes behind when I return to work on Thursdays, I tend to use a lot of dishes when I cook, and it’s been hot and neither cooking nor dishes are particularly enjoyable in this heat.
Then there’s the owl. Although I am 118 days into learning Dutch on Duolingo, Duo’s pathological need for attention from me is not as compatible with this current iteration of my life, as it was before. Yes, I’m back in the Diamond league this week, but for what? The relative slackers in the Obsidian league are much more my speed.
And given the gross irresponsibility of a large swath of this Country, (see this essay by Will Bunch: https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/why-americans-wont-get-vaccinated-trump-states-20210708.html) reentry will probably be a way of referring to our re-quarantine pretty soon, as we move through the Greek alphabet of variants to Zed.
The below poem will be the seed of a new one act play, once I figure out which original Lear players still have time to do a play on Zoom now…
“Fix me with your love...*”
It wasn’t
“drive and eat”
this time,
but hurry up,
slow down,
re-connect,
and also
disassociate
while behind
the wheel of
someone
else’s car,
listening
to another
era’s music,
driving through
a place
that also
belonged
to another
era,
in rush hour
traffic.
Meetings
of the survivors,
on familiar
porches,
places eerily
the same,
as if
the Black
Bunting had just
been pulled down,
in haste,
in response to
an unspoken
taboo.
2.
And one
missed plane
later,
I was
in the airport,
for the first
time since Covid,
drinking out
of a water
fountain for
The first time
since Covid,
Dining indoors
for the first
time since Covid,
Swimming in
a pool for
the first time
since Covid.
Able to hug,
for the first
time
since Covid,
And I had just
started a new job,
whose unfamiliarity
I would return to,
after so much
familiarity,
I could barely
process, or
even sleep
in Boston.
3.
And then,
five days
later,
I was back
in Chicago,
and returned
to “normalcy.”
Whatever that
meant then,
and may
mean now.
* “Future Love Paradise,” Seal, 1992
Yours, Mark